Season 3, Episode 12: Brent Adamson

Brent Adamson Reveals the New Psychology of B2B Buying

In this deep and eye-opening episode of Jack Rants with Modern Bankers, Jack Hubbard sits down with bestselling author and global sales thought leader Brent Adamson, co-author of The Challenger Sale, The Challenger Customer, and the groundbreaking new book The Frame-Making Sale.
Brent shares powerful new research revealing the real reason deals stall, buyers disappear, and decisions drag on and it has nothing to do with your brand, product, or value props. Instead, it all comes down to something far more human: customer self-confidence.
This episode is a must-listen for bankers, sales leaders, relationship managers, and anyone navigating today’s complex buying landscape. Brent’s insights will challenge everything you thought you knew about sales—and give you a new roadmap for winning decisions in a world where customers are overwhelmed and unsure.
If you’ve ever had a deal stall, a buyer ghost you, or a champion say “If it were up to me…” this episode will change the way you sell.

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Jack Hubbard: So if I say the challenger Sale, the Challenger Customer, you'll understand how excited I am about having my next guest on. His new book that he co-authored with Carl Schmidt, The Frame Making Sale.

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Jack Hubbard: I think this is the sales book of 2025. I read it, halfway to a client, the first half, halfway back home, couldn't put it down. Brent Adamson, thanks so much for being with us today.

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Brent Adamson: Absolutely, Jack, and thank you. That'sâ€¦ those are very kind words. I'm hoping the client was,

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Brent Adamson: You had a good client experience in between. She just wanted to, like, have a bad meeting and just read in anger all the way home.

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Jack Hubbard: I would have to say that it was a very different client experience.

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Brent Adamson: Is that right?

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Jack Hubbard: And I think, yeah, because I want to talk about some of these things that you put in the book. It's so focused on the customer.

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Brent Adamson: No.

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Jack Hubbard: it justâ€¦ you know, I'm a customer guy, I always have been, and we were talking before we started, your fellow co-author, Matt Dixon, wrote The Activator Advantage. All of this new stuffâ€¦

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Jack Hubbard: is coming into play, and it's all focused on the customer, and that's very, very exciting. So, thrilled to have you. Let's start at the kind of the beginning, if you will.

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Jack Hubbard: You've been around for a while, you've done a ton of work for CEB, Gardner, etc, and now you have your own firm, A to B Insights. Let's start there. Talk about A to B Insights, what you do, and who you help.

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Brent Adamson: Well, in some ways, what we do is the name is captured in theâ€¦ the idea is captured in the name of the company, A to B Insights, but only for those in the know. It's sort of an inside knowledge, sort of a reference to a concept we introduced in the Challenger Customer, which is the second of the two Challenger books.

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Brent Adamson: This idea of, if I want to drive change in the world before I build up the B and show you a vision of the new world, I've got to break down the A, which is your current state, and help you understand why the pain of same is actually greater than the pain of change.

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Brent Adamson: By the way, there's the entire Challenger canon in 30 seconds. What A2B Insight is for Carl, and so Carl's a former CEB-er at Gartner as well, so we all kind of came up together, and I pulled Carl out of semi-retirement to come write this book with me and build the company.

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Brent Adamson: In many ways, Jack, theâ€¦ for now, at least, the company A2B Insight is a vessel through which we write the book, Frame Making Sale, and take it to market and build an audience around it. There's a bigger, broader vision around what we want to do with A to B over time, which is to go back out into the world and launch and run these very large-scale

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Brent Adamson: research projects that we used to do at CB that, frankly, just aren't being done anymore, because we think those are the ones that have the benefit, or the potential, the potential

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Brent Adamson: toâ€¦ I don't want to overstate it, but I mean it quite sincerely, to change the world, at least change the world of how we sell and how we buy, or at least how we think about selling and how we think about buying.

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Brent Adamson: In some materially important ways, and the frame-making sale is our first effort along those lines, and if at some point the book does well enough to spin off a little extra money that we can actually then begin to fund some of those larger projects, then, then that's what we'll do.

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Jack Hubbard: It's really exciting, and I want to dive in, because it really is a page turner, but before we do that, you're out speaking a lot, and you're on the cusp of what's going on in sales. Before we started recording, you talked about sales amnesia, and how, you know, yeah, what's old is new again.

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Jack Hubbard: as we go into 2026, because here we are in December already, as we play this, as we play this program, what are you seeing? What's happening in sales in 2026?

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Brent Adamson: Well, I, you know, I think we all know what's happening, which is AI. But, you know, the flip side is, what is actually happening with AI? I think what's really happening is we're all talking about it, right? So we're allâ€¦

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Brent Adamson: And so I just did a post on LinkedIn just a few weeks ago, which is, you know, we're all talking about AI unless you read the frame-making sale, but something you may or may not have noticed sort of consciously is if you do a word search on the frame-making sale, AI is mentioned, I think, exactly twice in the entire book. It's over 200 pages, and we canâ€¦

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Brent Adamson: We could talk about how and why in a minute, if you'd like to explore that, because I think it's actually important.

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Brent Adamson: Butâ€¦ but I think whatâ€¦ there's a couple things that are particularly germane to the challengeâ€¦ the frame-making sales story around AI, is everybody's talking about it, everybody's experimenting with it.

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Brent Adamson: It's changing constantly. Everyone's bombarding the world with information, so we're all talking about our AI capability here and there, and so, as a customer.

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Brent Adamson: I think we're allâ€¦ I don't know about you, as even as a consumer, just as an individual trying to consume AI products and figure out what's valuable for me as a business owner, and just as a regular person living my life, it all feels kind of overwhelming, right? And soâ€¦ and I think, really, what's happened is you take that, along withâ€¦

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Brent Adamson: political polarization, and environmental degradation, and just, you know, wars, and just the world, and changing technology, and I think at some point.

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Brent Adamson: I don't know about you, Jack, I don't want to speak for anyone but myself, but nonetheless, what you see, broadly speaking, is that I think all of us are just in this position, whether it's through business news, or political news, or just environmental news, or whatever, it's just with this sense of, like, everything's coming at you at once, it's changing constantly, and it all feels just a little bit overwhelming.

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Brent Adamson: Andâ€¦ and there's just a real strong desire, I think, for all of us to sort of almost, like, run to safety, or just find something we can count on, or find something that feels like we can latch onto that has a little bit moreâ€¦

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Brent Adamson: clarity to it, because everything feelsâ€¦ I don't know, am I over the tops of my skis? What do you think? There's just this level of uncertainty

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Brent Adamson: Of what's gonna happen next, again, across all these different domains, seems to be pretty, pervasive.

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Jack Hubbard: Oh, it is. It is. And when you look atâ€¦ even within a platform, like LinkedIn, for example.

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Brent Adamson: Yep.

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Jack Hubbard: Just when you think you've mastered it, the algorithm changes, and now what you're trying to do is to game the algorithm, and that's another aspect of AI. I was with a banker recently, and she said, I think AI is making me stupider.

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Jack Hubbard: And I don't know if that's because we're depending so much on it that we don't do our own thinking anymore, or what have you, but you look at the political environment and all the things you've talked about, you know, my God, it's no wonder why people just kind of sit in their easy chair and watch sports all the time. It's the only good thing that's going on, except the betting scandals, of course.

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Brent Adamson: Well, yeah, and I think for a lot of us, it'sâ€¦ again, this is not the podcast I think you or I were planning on doing, so we don't have to go deep on this, but it's also just your social media feed. It's like you can get whatever your social media choice is, you know, like, the algorithm, once it gets a hold of you.

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Brent Adamson: it becomes, like, just my constant sort of dop-a-hit and distraction all at the same time, and it, like, you look up and realize you just lost an hour and a half to looking atâ€¦

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Brent Adamson: your feed, and if some of your listeners think I'm completely crazy, I would imagine the vast majority of them also think, yeah, I kind of do that, too. It's just that it's the, it's one of those things we don't even like to admit, right? But the, and I think part of it isâ€¦ it's entertainment, but part of it is escapism.

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Brent Adamson: But one way or another, I think it's just a really interesting time in this world where there's also just huge opportunity for someone to step up and say.

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Brent Adamson: let me help, right? Let me, let me help you not know something, but let me help you feel something, which is the heart and soul of frame making sale, as you know, too, which is let me help you feel, like, just a little bit more confident that you can make, you know, take decisive action and make decisions in this kind of environment where everything seems to be up for grabs.

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Jack Hubbard: Yeah.

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Jack Hubbard: You know, you talk about AI, This is CI.

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Jack Hubbard: This is customer intelligence. If you read this book, you're going to have a much better sense of why so many deals stall, why a lot of people ghost you, and we're going to talk about all of that today. But I gotta ask you, Brent, what was the inspiration for this book? Why now? Why did it come out now?

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Brent Adamson: Well, in many ways, the impetus, or the origins of the book, go back to work we were doing at C.B. Gartner. Carl and I, and others, Nick Tolman, who's now at SBI, and, you know, the,

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Brent Adamson: there's a CB diaspora now, just incredibly talented people all over the world, and back then, we were doing some really interesting work on trying to understand

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Brent Adamson: what needs to happen inside of a large, complex B2B purchase in order to increase the likelihood of what we call a high-quality, low-regret purchase? Which, as you know, Jack, because you've read the book, it's kind of theâ€¦ a high-quality, low-regret purchase is a purchase, or if you want a sale.

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Brent Adamson: Where the customer doesn't settle for status quo, they don't settle for the small pilot, they buy the bigger solution with the broader scope.

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Brent Adamson: And weirdly, they feel good about it. Usually, when you buy something big and complex, it comes with a little buyer's remorse. So what we're looking for is the unicorn. I buy the bigger thing, which we're all trying to do, which drives growth, and have customers feel good about not just the purchase, but about themselves for having made the purchase. So we call that a high-quality, low-regret sale.

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Brent Adamson: In studying that question for probably about the process of at least 3 years, we studied that question across a whole bunch of different research teams in sales and marketing and different places and different groups.

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Brent Adamson: And, you know, all with customers involved in large, complex B2B purchases, and we took everything, anything, Jack, that we could think of and ran it through that model, right? So we took Challenger and broke it down to its component elements. We took Teach, Tailor, Take Control, and, you know.

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Brent Adamson: de-aggregated that into its actual original components and ran a lot of that stuff through the model. By the way, teaching in particular still pops, so when you engage in what'sâ€¦ when Challenger we call commercial teaching, not surprisingly, the likelihood of a high-quality, low-regret deal goes up almost by 2X. It's about 180%, which is a huge bump, right?

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Brent Adamson: Thank goodness. It would have been a bummer if that didn't work out that way. But we looked at marketing content, we looked at content attributes, we looked at buying group configurations, we literally looked at anything and everything that we could think of to run through this model.

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Brent Adamson: Meanwhile, at the same time, we had begun doing some work with a guy named Bob Mesta, and some of your listeners will know who Bob Mesta is, M-O-E-S-T-A. Bob's brilliant.

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Brent Adamson: Bob worked with Clayton Christensen to write the jobs to be done work that showed up in Harvard Business Review and kind of changed a lot of what we think about in terms of all sorts of customer insights.

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Brent Adamson: And working with Bob, there's a longer story here, I don't think I'll unpack now, unless you want to go there, but one of the things we came to understand was how important it is for customers, as they complete these buying jobs, to feelâ€¦ we always ask, like, well, how do you know when a job is done? Like, whether it'sâ€¦

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Brent Adamson: solution exploration, whether it's problem identification, or solution exploration, or requirements building, these are the different jobs we identified as part of a B2B purchase, but how do you know when you're done?

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Brent Adamson: And the answer is, well, customers know when they're done, when they kind of feel that they're done, when they feel that they're confident. Well, that's weird. So we started taking these ideas of confidence and baking them into these surveys, and lo and behold, what we found, Jack, is that

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Brent Adamson: By far, the number one driver of a high-quality, low-regret purchase is the degree to which customers report a high level of confidence in the decision that they're making on behalf of their companies. We call that decision confidence. And what's interesting is, you know, I mentioned, for example, the Challenger work was a, you know, 180% increase. When I say by far, I know it's not a very technical term.

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Brent Adamson: But thisâ€¦ this impact of decision confidence, you know, if everything else was here, here, here, it was, like, up here. It was off the charts. You know, it wasâ€¦ it was an order of magnitude higher than anything else, and this massive impact onâ€¦

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Brent Adamson: Customers feelingâ€¦ like, which stands to reason, if customers aren't confident in the choice they're making on behalf of their company, they're gonna choose not to choose. Which sounds really, really obvious in certain ways.

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Brent Adamson: But the thing that really got meâ€¦ so, wasâ€¦ was this, is that when you unpack these different dimensions of confidence.

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Brent Adamson: The first thing you learn is this. You kind of come away from this data and say, you know, what this tells me is we need to run everything through the lens of customer confidence, in terms of sales, in terms of marketing success, customer engagement, relationship management and banking, all of it.

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Brent Adamson: What are we doing to help customers feel more confident in the decision they're making?

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Brent Adamson: What I found when I show that to CEOs and MDs and EVPs and, you know, senior leaders.

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Brent Adamson: what the reaction I would get often would be.

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Brent Adamson: We agree. That, you know, like, it felt like a self-evident sort of conclusion, like, well, of course, if customers aren't confident, they're gonna choose not to choose. Here's what would they say next, though. It was so interesting, Jack. Say, that's why, Brent.

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Brent Adamson: That's why we need to do everything and anything we can to make sure customers are confident in our product, confident in our brand, confident in our people. That's why we need to be trusted advisors, that's why we need to be thought leaders.

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Brent Adamson: And this is why I wrote this book, because this is where the whole story takes a left turn. Because when you dig into the dimensions of confidence and make up this huge bar that towers over everything else on this bar chart, it turns out that the attributes of confidence that matter, that make up decision confidence, aren't supplier-specific, they're actually supplier agnostic.

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Brent Adamson: They're things like, how confident are we that, as a buying team, that we even asked the right questions in the first place? How confident are we that we thoroughly looked at alternatives? How confident are we that we did sufficient amounts of research?

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Brent Adamson: And so when you begin to look at this, like, oh, so the singleâ€¦ like, the wormhole to growth, like, the single shortest path to driving growth for your company and for your brand and for your products.

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Brent Adamson: Is a list of attributes that has nothing to do with you at all.

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Brent Adamson: It has to do not with customer supplier perception, but customer self-perception.

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Brent Adamson: And that, to me, wasâ€¦ and that just kind of sat there, right? And so, at Gartner, we kind of moved on to new products and new topics and issues, and started researching some really cool stuff that we did elsewhere. But that one finding check just always kind of sat there, and it's always been sort of nagging at me, which is to say.

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Brent Adamson: What does it look like to go to market? What does it look like as a sales professional, as a go-to-market team, to go to market, to engage customers specifically in a way that was designed to change their self-perception, and not just their supplier perception? And I've always wondered that, and this book is an attempt to provide an answer to that question.

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Jack Hubbard: So, you talk about a left turn.

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Brent Adamson: Yeah.

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Jack Hubbard: How doâ€¦ so, we've been teaching bankers forever, you know, trust-based selling and consultative selling, and consultative selling is

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Jack Hubbard: Buyer has the answer, seller has the questions.

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Jack Hubbard: I get the answers, I create a solution. It turns outâ€¦

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Jack Hubbard: that I might be asking the wrong questions. So how do we retrain salespeople that have been doing this for many years, focused on value, focused on building trust.

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Jack Hubbard: But ultimately, having to shift their whole idea around sales, because the customer indecision and the customer uncertainty is so strong. How do you do that?

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Brent Adamson: It was, you know, soâ€¦

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Brent Adamson: first of all, I think the why is kind of what we talked about already, but just to give you a sense for how hard this is.

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Brent Adamson: everything that you just said seems so self-evident in the DNA of sales and marketing, right? Which isâ€¦

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Brent Adamson: How do we build trust?

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Brent Adamson: How do we demonstrate value, right? Those two questions alone are sort of the two sort of main pillars of everything we do in GoToMarket, right? How do we build trust, and how do we demonstrate value? But stop and think about those two for a second, just for a moment, because I think it's really worth unpacking the language. How do we build trust?

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Brent Adamson: Notice that implicit, it's never stated out loud, but it's absolutely implicit, is to say, how do we build customers' trust

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Brent Adamson: In us.

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Brent Adamson: How do we build customers' trust in our product? How do we build customers' trust in our brand? And then, same things, how do we demonstrate value?

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Brent Adamson: How do we demonstrate customersâ€¦ how do we demonstrate our value to customers? How do we demonstrate our value toâ€¦ you see what I'm saying? So, notice that even when we try to say we're going to be very customer-centric and build customers' trust, and we're going to demonstrate value to our customers, so we think now we're being customer-centric.

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Brent Adamson: All we're really doing is we're being supplier-centric with a little thin veneer of customer over top of it, right? Because we're still solvingâ€¦ it's kind of like dating. It's like, enough about me, now you talk about me, right? It's likeâ€¦ it's like, I love me, but do you love me as much as I love me? That's kind of how we're all going to market, right? And so, what I'm asking is, what does it look like to go to market and say, how do I help you love yourself a little bit more? If that got weird, I didn't mean it to be, butâ€¦ but notice, it's a completely different perspective

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Brent Adamson: which is, how do Iâ€¦ the whole idea is that our biggest competitor today, in many ways, is just indecision. It's no decision, it's status quo, it's just confusion, it's resignation. And so, at some point, I was just like, you know, never mind, I'll look at this again in six months, or I'll revisit this, or I'll keep doing some research.

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Brent Adamson: And if you think about, if we could just help our customers feel more confident in themselves to just make a decision, and just maintain our share of the pie, but make the pie bigger by just getting more decisions happening, we will drive growth.

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Brent Adamson: And I think thatâ€¦ that in many ways isâ€¦ isâ€¦ and I don't know that Iâ€¦ I mean, I think I lost track of your question, because I gotâ€¦ I got on a bit of a rant there, butâ€¦ but I just wantâ€¦ I just want to make sureâ€¦

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Brent Adamson: the thing that keeps me up at night, Jack, is what I call the false positive. And so when peopleâ€¦ the false positive here being, oh yeah, trust, Brent, obviously, it's confidence. We need to make customers more confident. No, duh. And it's like, this is so different than anything that we talk about right now in practice or in just in conversation.

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Brent Adamson: That, to your point, it really takes a moment to get someone to stop and think aboutâ€¦ Alright, soâ€¦

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Brent Adamson: what does it even mean? What does it mean to help someone change the way they think about themselves? And so maybe we should unpack that, which is really, I guess, your question to unpack that, but let me take a breath, because

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Brent Adamson: I don'tâ€¦ to me, it feels totally different once you scratch the surface, because I think there's this moment, this aha, I'm always like, oh, oh, that's what you mean? Oh, no, we don't do that. Is thatâ€¦ is that fair, or is that not how you're seeing it?

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Jack Hubbard: Really fair. I think the biggest challenge you're gonna have is.

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Brent Adamson: Hmm.

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Jack Hubbard: actually getting salespeople to ask these kinds of questions, because too often what happens is, how confident are we that we ask the right questions? This is a customer now.

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Brent Adamson: Yeah. How confident are we that we conducted sufficient research?

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Jack Hubbard: How confident are we? So if I turn that around and I say, now, before we go any further, how confident are you that you really and your team have asked the right questions? What I'm really saying is.

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Jack Hubbard: are you sure you want to go with me? And are you sure you don't want to think about this more? And here's the other thing that I wanted to ask you, because.

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Brent Adamson: Yeah.

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Jack Hubbard: I remember when I read Challenger Customer, the number 5.4 popped up, and that was the number of decision makers in a middle market company, and now you say it's gone to 11. This is getting real hard to sell somebody, Brent, it would seem.

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Brent Adamson: You know, 100%. So, by the way, I talked to a large tech company the other day in their key account program. They track 60 to 70, sometimes over 100 stakeholders involved in aâ€¦ you know, these are multiâ€¦ hundreds of million dollar accounts. These are big, big accounts, right? But nonetheless, at some point, you're right.

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Brent Adamson: to yourâ€¦ I think your question is exactly the right one to kind ofâ€¦ as a starting point, Jack, which is, like, how am I supposed to sell into this kind of a complex environment?

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Brent Adamson: If you take your selling hat off.

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Brent Adamson: Take your selling hat off for just a moment, and just engage in this moment of empathy with me.

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Brent Adamson: Think about your customer stakeholder, because not only are you thinking, I don't know how to navigate all that, you know what they're thinking? They're thinking, I don't know how to navigate all that, right? In other words, they're thinking the same thing that you're thinking, which is, I'd rather, like, not do that. That sounds awful.

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Brent Adamson: I gotta get all these people in my company lined up around not just thisâ€¦ buying this thing, but the budget, and the priorities, and everything else, and it's like, and then the IT integration, and who knows what else. It's like, at some point.

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Brent Adamson: I love you, Jack, but that's just not worth it, right? And this is what happens. And by the way, one of the ways this will show up is that maddening thing that we hear from our customers. I can'tâ€¦ I hear this even now in the stuff that I sell, which isâ€¦ you ready for this, Jack? See if you've heard this.

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Brent Adamson: You know, Jack, if we'reâ€¦ I love what you do. I love what your company does, I love what you represent, I love the relationship we had, I trust you, I think you're amazing, and I'll tell you something, Jack, if it were just up to me.

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Brent Adamson: I would have made this decision already.

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Brent Adamson: You know, it'sâ€¦ theâ€¦ if it were just up to me line is sort ofâ€¦ it kind of makes you hurt in your stomach a little bit, doesn't it? Because, like, ugh, it's likeâ€¦ becauseâ€¦ here'sâ€¦ here'sâ€¦ let me back up and take a running start at this.

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Brent Adamson: So, one of the things that we know

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Brent Adamson: from B2B buying, just from all of our research, is that when you think about a purchase, and we go back to these buying jobs, right? You think, how hard could it be? I'm gonna buy, I don't know, I'm gonna buy financial instruments, or I'm gonna buy a financial partner, right? Or I'm gonna invest, you know, establish a new relationship with a financial partner, or I'm gonna buy an IT system, whatever my capital equipment.

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Brent Adamson: You think, well, okay, it's complex, but how hard could it be, right? It's these four jobs. You identify a problem, you explore solutions, you build requirements, you select a supplier, and you're done.

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Brent Adamson: But what happens, of course, is like that old saying of no plan ever survived engagement with the enemy, or what's the Mike Tyson quote, you know, like, everybody has a plan until you get hit in the face sort of thing. So you start, like, identifying a problem, and you move into solution exploration, all of a suddenâ€¦

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Brent Adamson: someone else gets involved and they've got a different set of priorities, or technology changes, because AI is changing everything day by day, or something else happens, like, oh god, now we can start over again. It's like, it's always two steps forward, one step back.

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Brent Adamson: Sometimes it's one step forward, two steps back, you finally make a lot of progress, then procurement gets involved and blows everything up again.

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Brent Adamson: And what we're finding is, it's exhausting. It's awful.

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Brent Adamson: In fact, I have done this quite literally now, for about pre-pandemic, so it's a total of 6, 7 years now.

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Brent Adamson: I've traveled in my role, in my roles all over the world.

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Brent Adamson: running a really interesting thought experiment, with senior executives. I simply ask them, so usually it's heads of sales and heads of marketing I'm talking to, I'll say, alright, just take your sales hat off, your marketing hat off for a moment, and just think about your own experience in your own company with your colleagues in not selling something, but in buying something.

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Brent Adamson: Think about something that you and your colleagues have bought in the last 6, 12, 18 months, you know, whether it's capital equipment, again, consulting services, whatever it might, software, you name it.

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Brent Adamson: And I want you to think about all the people involved, all the steps that it took, all the different decisions you had to make, all theâ€¦ you know, and think about all the different steps along the way. Now, if I were to ask you for one word, one adjective that describes that entire buying journey, what would that word be?

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Brent Adamson: And this is the absolute honest truth, Jax. I've asked tens of thousands of people that question now, in big stages and small rooms. I've yet to hear a positive word.

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Brent Adamson: Not a single one.

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Brent Adamson: It's always the same thing. It's long, hard, awful, frustrating. Someone said landmine, I said, that's not an adjective. He said landmine-ish, so it became my word for the year.

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Brent Adamson: The one I think, and we talk about this in the book, the one that sticks with me the most was aâ€¦ it was a meeting I was doing in Chicago with CMOs, Chief Marketing Officers, and I asked a question, and there wasâ€¦ there's the CMO, and she was kind of quiet, sitting in the middle of the room, and I asked her what her word was, and she said, I'll tell you what my word is.

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Brent Adamson: We just spent the last 2 years buying a CRM system.

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Brent Adamson: And my word is, I never want to do that again. All one word, all jammed together, and she meant it. You could see in her eyes that she was, like, reliving the pain of that decision, and she said, I never want to do that again.

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Brent Adamson: And it raises this really interesting question, which is, what do you do?

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Brent Adamson: when the number one word that your customer thinks about, not in buying your solution, but a solution like yours, is, I never want to do that again.

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Brent Adamson: And it shows you what we're up against, because the next thing is a two-question exercise, and the second question I always ask these individuals is, alright, how much of that pain, how much of that frustration, how much of that land minishness was the result of the seller selling to you?

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Brent Adamson: And how much was it just your own company getting in its own way?

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Brent Adamson: And you can imagine, Jack, what they say, this is our own company. The sellers are fine. They're not great, I guess, but they're fine. You know, they told me what I wanted to know, maybe.

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Brent Adamson: But it's just our own company, it's our decision-making process, it's our budgets, it's ourâ€¦ it's our regulations, it's all of it, it's just so overwhelming. And at some point, people are just gettingâ€¦ you know, they're not just scared, sometimes they're scared, I think more often than not, they're just overwhelmed, they're resigned, they're just frustrated, they're just like, you know what, I justâ€¦ I don't want to do that.

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Brent Adamson: And I was at Dreamforce a couple weeks ago, and I told one of the sales leaders at Salesforce, I said, you know, because they're selling CRM systems, I said, every time one of your sales reps walks in the door, virtually or in person, to a customer, they are immediately, upon arrival, paying the price for your customers

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Brent Adamson: past bad decisions and decision-making processes. You are paying the price for their bad memory.

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Brent Adamson: And that's the uphill battle that you're facing. Not because they don't want to buy from you, or don't like you, or don't like your product, or don't like your brand, or don't trust you, it's because they just don't want to do that again.

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Brent Adamson: And so the question becomes, how can you become the one seller that shows up and says, I know it's overwhelming, in working with other customers like you, who have found a way to make this a little bit easier, let me show you what we've learned, and I think can be really interesting to just make this whole thing just a little bit easier for you. And take this whole thing that's big and hard and overwhelming, and put aâ€¦

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Brent Adamson: put a boundary around it, put what we call a frame, this is what framing comes from, and say, you know, when working with other customers like you, we find it's a lot, but it really comes down to, like, these three decisions and this one question that everyone tends to overlook. So, essentially, I become your guide, your coach, your Sherpa, to guide you through that purchase decision, to make you feel like, maybe Iâ€¦

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Brent Adamson: Maybe I can do this. And that's what it means to help customers feel more confident on you, but in themselves.

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Brent Adamson: is to help them, based on what you've learned from other companies. There's a real asymmetry in buying today. We always assume the asymmetry of buying skews in favor of the customer. It's their process, it's their company, it's their people, they know how to do this, I don't know how to sell this, or I don't know how they should buy.

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Brent Adamson: But in fact, you know how better to buy your solutions than your customers do, because you've watched other companies do it successfully and unsuccessfully, and you can turn that into advice beyond the features and benefits of your product that allows you to show up not just as a salesperson, but as a human being and as a coach.

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Brent Adamson: To help them feel better about themselves. And that's really what we're trying to get after in Framing.

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Jack Hubbard: And we're talking to the co-author of The Frame Making Sale, making his third appearance on this program, because he keeps writing amazing stuff, Brent Adamson. So, you've gotten into frame making, and in the book, you talk about three steps in the process. What are those steps?

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Brent Adamson: So, because every book that at least I seem to write, it has to have 3 things, and I teach Taylor, take control from Challenger, right? So, my co-author Carl's like, Brent, we need 3 things! Like, okay, alright, what are 3 things? Three things. So the, matt does this, too, in the works, in the books he writes, too, right? So, for us.

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Brent Adamson: as you think about, if I'm going to coach customers and guide them and help them feel more confident in themselves for a purchase, the first thing I have to figure out is what to coach them on. Like, what do they not know but should? Which has a kind of a challenger aspect to it, but specifically about the process of deciding. So we call that establish, which is how toâ€¦ if I'm going to provide you a frame.

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Brent Adamson: within which there's still degrees of freedom for you to take action, make decisions, but what does that frame look like? What are theâ€¦ you know, if it boils down to these four questions, or these two pieces of content, or there's a couple different dimensions along which we do this, what does that look like? So what, essentially, what is the content of my guidance, of my advice? That's established.

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Brent Adamson: The second one, which we can park on for just a little bit, so that's established, the other two are engage and execute. So, establish, engage, execute. Engage is how I engage customers with that advice. And the third one is execute, is how do I help them execute that advice over time, so that I'm doing a better job of building collective confidence, and I'm maintaining that confidence over time.

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Brent Adamson: But there's aâ€¦ so those are the three E's, Jack. There's a really interesting lesson we learned on Engage that I think is super interesting. I'd love to share with you if that'sâ€¦ if you want to dig in there, we can goâ€¦ we can come back to that.

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Brent Adamson: So, so the unengageâ€¦

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Brent Adamson: One of the things that we know from our research, and I wrote an article in Harvard Business Review right before I left Gartner called Sense Making for Sales, which some may have bumped into, and that's nowâ€¦ a version of that is now chapter 5 of this book.

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Brent Adamson: Chapter 4 of this book. Doesn't matter. But the, but in any case, it's all about information overload, how your customers are just overwhelmed with too much information, too much content.

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Brent Adamson: And one of the things we found in our research is in that environment, if you show up and play the role of an expert, like, oh, you don't need real, here's what you need to know, or I've been doing this for 30 years, Jack, I've been doing this for a long time, here's what you need to know. You know what happens? It's really so fascinating, because when you show up and sort of adopt this expert posture, which is kind of consistent with what we all thought we were supposed to do, and to be a trusted advisor.

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Brent Adamson: You actually do damage to customers' self-confidence. You actually make them feel less confident, not more confident, because in many ways, you're solving for the wrong problem.

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Brent Adamson: when I say, I've been doing this for 30 years, here's what you need to do, I'm essentially telling you, hey, Jack, trust me. I'm solving for your confidence in me. But that's notâ€¦ again, that's not the bogey. The bogey is, how do we solve for a customer's confidence in themselves? And so what happens in that environment is actually this idea of sense-making, which is a flavor or version of frame-making, which isâ€¦

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Brent Adamson: Injectors, you know, working with a lot of customers, one of the things we find is it's pretty overwhelming, there's a lot of content out there, it's changing fast, and what we've learned from a couple of them is that

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Brent Adamson: the best way to make progress is really to kind of boil downâ€¦ we'veâ€¦ they've taught us that it really kind of comes down to sort of these three questions, and one of which is a little bit surprising. So what I'm trying to do is help you make sense of the information without specifically telling you what to do, because I gottaâ€¦ the other thing that we really dwell on or park on a lot in this book, is this idea of agency, customer agency. In other words, if it'sâ€¦

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Brent Adamson: If it's their self-confidence that matters, they have to be the ones that make the decision.

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Brent Adamson: Which, if someoneâ€¦ I was talking toâ€¦

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Brent Adamson: Charlie Green a couple weeks ago. I don't know ifâ€¦ do you know Charlie? Have you met Charlie?

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Jack Hubbard: He's a good friend.

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Brent Adamson: Charlie's a great guy. He isâ€¦ he's brilliant. So, for those who don't know, Charlie is one of the co-authors of Trusted Advisor.

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Brent Adamson: And I was really curious to get his input, because, as you can tell, I'm out talking a lot about this idea of trust, and I wanted to run these ideas by him, just to get his reaction.

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Brent Adamson: And I think, by the way, for what it's worth, I think we're really aligned, which is really gratifying, because the guy'sâ€¦ he's a wonderful human being, and he's really smart.

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Brent Adamson: But what Charlie said was actually kind of interesting. He says, it's kind of like a good therapist, right? So if I'm in aâ€¦ you imagine if in therapy, a therapist doesn't tell a patient what to do or what to think.

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Brent Adamson: but rather creates a framework, enablesâ€¦ it creates an environment, a context that enables the patient to come to their own conclusions about what to do for themselves. And it's essentially the same sort of parallel to what frame-making is all about. So, all that's say in the second of the three E's, so there's establish, and then there's this engage.

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Brent Adamson: Rather than showing up saying, we've been doing this for 30 years, here's what you need to do.

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Brent Adamson: you know, with a nod to Robert Cialdini and his book, Influence, let's rely on social proof. Let's talk aboutâ€¦ because the one thing your customers all want is to know what other customers like them are doing, and by the way.

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Brent Adamson: for your audience in financial sector, just think about, you know, on the consumer side, right? It's like theâ€¦ a lot of families want to know, like, what do other families with two young children at this age in theirâ€¦ whatâ€¦ how do they think about their risk profile, right? I mean, it's like, whether it's a company or an individual, a consumer, or a business.

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Brent Adamson: We all have this insatiable desire to know what other people like us are doing, because it gives us more confidence that we're not alone, we're doing something, you know.

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Brent Adamson: not crazy, right? Soâ€¦ so we call this the phrase that frames. And the phrase that frames is a sales rep who engages customers with this advice with a phrase like this. And you've heard me say it a hundred times already, you may not have noticed. In working with other customers like you.

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Brent Adamson: One of the things that we've been surprised to learn isâ€¦ and then fill in the blank. And there's a lot to unpack, and by the way, it doesn't have to be verbatim, it doesn't have to be exactly like that, but there's a lot going on there, so working with other customers like you.

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Brent Adamson: I'm not leaning on my expertise. I'm not telling you what I know, or what I think. My role, my value isn't so much my expertise, my value is my access. It's my ability to connect you to other people like you. And this is why I think this frame-making is such a cool opportunity for

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Brent Adamson: newbie sellers, you know, right out of college, right? It's like, as long as you have access, or your company has access, you can play this card right away. And I know that from personal experience, because it's what I did when I joined CEB, as a German professor, of all things, telling CESOs how to run their key account program.

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Brent Adamson: So, in working with other customers like you, one of the things we've been surprised to learn is, notice my posture is a co-learner. I'm not here to tell you what to do, I'm here to learn with you. And I've beenâ€¦ I'm kind of surprised by this, too. This is crazy. What do you think? What do you think? Here's what I think. What do you think of this? You know, it's likeâ€¦ so it creates this moment of empathy.

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Brent Adamson: and connection, that I'm kind of stepping over to your side of the table and saying, let's see if we can just figure out this together, Jack, based on, sort of, here's what we're seeing out there that you may not have access to.

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Brent Adamson: And it completely changes the posture of the relationship fromâ€¦

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Brent Adamson: who are you to tell me how to run my business? To, like, hey, do you have more of that access? Because that was actually really helpful, and, like, can we just talk through this? And so it's aâ€¦ and this is, again, what frame-making is all about, is having a thought partner as opposed to an expert, turns out to be really powerful.

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Jack Hubbard: Thought partner versus thought leader.

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Brent Adamson: Yeah. Go on in the book, and keep going on your rule of threes.

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Jack Hubbard: You go on in the book, and you talk about three different salespeople, giving, telling, and sense-making. Now, when I had started reading this, I thought, okay, I know which one is going to be the best, and that's giving, because giving salespeopleâ€¦ let me share value with you, but this is totally reversed. You say sense-makingâ€¦

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Jack Hubbard: is by far the best. Talk about those threeâ€¦ I mean, you sort of did, but go through them again and talk about why sense-making is so important.

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Brent Adamson: Well, so the one I didn't hit was giving. Giving's really interesting, because it feels right, right? In some way. And by the way, for what it's worth, I will be the first person, I mean this quite sincerely, to raise my hand and say I still believe in so much of what we talked about in the Challenger Sale.

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Brent Adamson: That IP is now owned by the Richardson Company, so I have no direct affiliation with Challenger, per se, other than my name's on the book. But I still believe in it, because I think we nailed it, particularly 15 years ago when we first wrote it. But the context, and that's the word that we didn't use in the Challenger sale that's so critical today, is the word context.

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Brent Adamson: Because any commercial insight, which is what we talk about in Challenger.

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Brent Adamson: That is designed to change the way customers think about their business, show them new ways to make money, save money.

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Brent Adamson: That becomes a really powerful tool to reframe their thinking, to knock down the A, to build up the B.

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Brent Adamson: All the things we talk about there.

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Brent Adamson: But the challenge is that in today's context, where so many companies are all trying to be a thought leader, they're all trying toâ€¦ I joke in the book, and I've joked elsewhere too, is I think somewhere around 2013, every CEO in the world woke up on the same morning and said, I know how we're gonna stand out, we're gonna become a thought leader in our industry.

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Brent Adamson: And certainly that's absolutely true for financial services, where any financial instrument that you create can be replicated within quite literally seconds, right? So there's a strong belief in, say, 2012-13 that, you know, virtually every financial service company woke up and said, we're gonna get on the content marketing bandwagon, because that's how we're gonna stand out.

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Brent Adamson: And so everyone did the same thing in the same way across the same amount of time, and so what weâ€¦ you know, I joke, I call this the smartness arms race.

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Brent Adamson: And the smart disarms race essentially has landed in a tie, where everyone's saying really, really smart stuff.

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Brent Adamson: And so they all sound the same again, but the only one to lose is your customer, because now you're saying smart stuff, and you're telling me to zig, they're saying smart stuff, and they're telling me to zag, and now I justâ€¦

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Brent Adamson: I don't know what to do. And AI's telling me something else, and every time I change a prompt, it changes the answer. Oh, God, that's not helpful.

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Brent Adamson: Right? So what do I do? And now imagine that world, you show up and say, hey, but have you read my white paper?

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Brent Adamson: It's likeâ€¦ it's like, no, you're not helpful. It's like, please, just go away. It's like, it doesn't matter how great the white paper is, like, even if, let's say it's amazing, and it blows my mind, it's like, oh, bleep, now there's one more thing I gotta worry about, right? It's likeâ€¦

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Brent Adamson: So, it isâ€¦ in this world, the one who wins isn't someone who just shows up and gives you more information. We call that indiscriminate generosity, right? It's likeâ€¦

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Brent Adamson: there's gotta be some context of saying, here's how we think about it. To be fair, I think that's still fair game, and I think there's still value in Challenger, but here's how we think about it, and here's how it fits in with everything else that you're reading. Just let me see if I can help you kind of make sense out of all of it. It's not, hey, stop reading that stuff from our competitors, start reading our stuff, because no one's going to do that anyway. It's ratherâ€¦

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Brent Adamson: You know, what we found with working with other customers like you, who are really grappling with this tough question of, sort of, Gen AI in a whatever world, whatever it might be, and it's changing so fast, we found, just to kind of anchor you on something, we've learned that really kind of boils down to these three questions, or these threeâ€¦ oh, by the way, there's this one piece ofâ€¦

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Brent Adamson: So we tell the story of a company called Expedient in the book, which is a cloud services company.

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Brent Adamson: And they were competing, you know, they compete against the big dogs that we all know, the huge, huge companies, and one of those huge, huge companies had a video series that everyone was watching, and they knew this, because they went out and asked, they talked to their customers and asked them, what are you consuming? What are you reading? What are you watching? What are you downloading? And there's this one video series everyone was watching.

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Brent Adamson: And so Brian Smith, who's the CEO at Expedient, when he found this out through his research.

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Brent Adamson: His first reaction, Jack, was, well, we need a video series, too. It's like, soâ€¦ and we're gonna go, like, head-to-head video series, like, and then he realized, one, it's gonna take time, two, it's gonna cost a lot of money, and three, this other company still has this massive brand, and customers are still gonna find it anyway, soâ€¦

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Brent Adamson: What he trained his sellers to do was actually really quite clever and a little bit scary. He said, let's not produce another piece of content. Rather, let's use that piece of content to have better conversations. So, his sellers, rather than running away from it, run right at it, and they'll say, have you seen this video series from Company X? If you haven't, you're gonna probably bump into it eventually, because it's actually really helpful.

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Brent Adamson: And you're gonna find it's gonna answer a lot of your questions. One thing we've found in working with other customers like you, though, is there's a couple things that aren't there that probably need to be to really help you get after this question, particularly given how things have changed. And there's one thing that's just evolved a little bit differently, and there'sâ€¦ and for a company your size, there's one thing that we want to make sure that's on your radar screen we've learned is really important.

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Brent Adamson: See what I'm saying? So what I've essentially done, it's kind of like getting ahead of the RFP, except now I'm getting ahead of customer learning. I'm sort of skewingâ€¦ I'm giving you a filter through which to read other people's content. It's actually quite clever. But from a customer's perspective, what you're doing is giving me help.

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Brent Adamson: And I think in your industry, this is what greatâ€¦ at least on the consumer side, which is where I engage with your industry of banking and financial services, is a great financial planner won't necessarily say, oh, you need to invest X number of dollars in that fund. It's like, you know, well, that's what you think, but rather.

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Brent Adamson: Here, you know, based on your risk, your appetite for risk, and sort of where you're trying to go, and your ultimate objectives, and given the fact, you know, here's the kinds of things that you're going to want to ask yourself to help you come to your own decision.

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Brent Adamson: And I think there's no better and more obvious place to deploy frame-making, in my mind, than banking and financial services more broadly, because so much of it is about risk, and your appetite for risk, right? And so it'sâ€¦ and that's gonna differ, and so the answer for different companies is gonna be different, soâ€¦

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Brent Adamson: if I could just put a frame around that decision, help you understand these are the criteria you want to consider, whether it's around implementation, whether it's around outcomes, whether it's around information, around process,

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Brent Adamson: But this is what we've learned that's gonna help you come to the best decision that you can come to, given where you're facing. Thatâ€¦ that isâ€¦

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Brent Adamson: that's a sales rep I'll talk to. If so-and-so shows up and gives me, like, a white paper to read and tells me about their features and benefits, I could have done that on your website and you're wasting my time.

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Brent Adamson: But if you can help me feel better about the decision I'm making, that's a conversation that's worth having.

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Jack Hubbard: It is, and in the book, it talks about these three kinds of salespeople.

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Jack Hubbard: And I can do everything I possibly can. I can be a giver, I can be a teller, I can be a sense maker, and ultimately, it's up to the buyer, and they may ghost me. So I guess my question is.

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Jack Hubbard: Salespeople listening to this are going, okay, Brent, this sounds really good. I've done all of what you suggest in the book, and my buyer isn't calling me back.

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Jack Hubbard: Now what? What do I do now?

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Brent Adamson: So painful. I've got a few on theâ€¦ Look, just so we're super clear on this, I will raise my hand and say, I have a few on my current opportunity list, they're doing that to me right now. So I, you know, Iâ€¦ so thisâ€¦ what we're doing here is increasing probabilities of success, not solving the problem.

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Brent Adamson: It's just maddening, isn't it?

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Brent Adamson: But here, it's not always true, but often what's true, I've found, is you know why customersâ€¦

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Brent Adamson: Often will ghost you.

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Brent Adamson: And I've seen this happen quite often, I've heard so many stories from the field about this. Oftentimes, when customers are ghosting you.

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Brent Adamson: It's not about you, it's about them. Very much like when someone doesn't want to date you, right? You think it's like, well, it's me, isn't it? I'm gonna change my shirt, I'll take a shower, I'll shave, I'll put on different cologne, whatever it is, I just want you to like me. And it turns out, no, they're just in a different place in their lives, and they just don't want to date anyone, or justâ€¦ So, everything comes back to dating for me, I don't know why, it's very strange, but the,

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Brent Adamson: But, because I think at the heart and soul of frame making is this is really about humanity. It's a story of human relations and human interactions. And I think what's interesting about ghosting is that many times your customer hasn't called you back.

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Brent Adamson: Because they've run into some obstacle. Theyâ€¦ so, you had me, Jack, if it were just up to me, I'd buy your solution, I love it, I see the value, I trust you, I want this, I'm really excited for it, I can see how it's gonna help me in my job, and then I go talk to my 3 bosses, or my boss's boss, or my two other colleagues, and they tell me 5 reasons why there's other things that are more important. And now I'm just frustrated.

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Brent Adamson: And now I'm notâ€¦ I'm not mad at you. You were great. I'm mad at me, I'm mad at my company, I'm mad at the world. It's like, this is why we can't have nice things. And soâ€¦ but I don't want to call you and tell you all that, because it's kind of embarrassing. Do you know what I mean? It's like, it's justâ€¦ it's like, I just want this whole thing to just neverâ€¦ oh, just never mind, I just want the whole thing to just go away. Let me just move on to my next project.

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Brent Adamson: Right? And meanwhile, you're out there saying, I thought we had something, why aren't you calling me back? And you're not seeing all this, right?

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Brent Adamson: And oftentimes, when you finally get me to pick up the phone and call you back, or join your Zoom call, or whatever it is, I find that those conversations often start with the four worst words you can hear in sales.

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Brent Adamson: And the four worst words you can hear in sales, as we lay this out in the book, isâ€¦

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Brent Adamson: it turns out that, right? It's like, I joke, it's like, any conversation in sales that starts with, it turns out that, is kind of like a relationship. Conversation starts with, we need to talk, it's all downhill from there, right? So it turns out that

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Brent Adamson: Well, you know, Jack, it turns out the procurement got involved, and they had some really tough questions, or it turns out that legal had to look this, or it turns out because of GDPR regulations in Europe, and the sort of data protection issues, that this isn't going to fly in the way that I was hoping it would, or on and on, or it turns out that we just decided to go in a different direction this year.

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Brent Adamson: And what's interesting to me is, every time your customer calls and tells you it turns out that, one, they didn't want to tell you that, because, one, they have to admit that they didn't have the clout that they had, they have to let you down, which they don't want to do, and there's a thousand other reasons why, but they,

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Brent Adamson: But more often than not, when they tell you it turns out that, you know, more often than not, they're surprised. I didn't know procurement was going to get involved. I didn't know we were going to run these obstacles. I didn't know that this was an issue, and I feel kind of embarrassed that I didn't know.

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Brent Adamson: But more often than not, what we find is, you know who's not surprised is the seller. Oh, let me guess, procurement got involved. I bet I can guess at 3 questions. And again, this goes back to this asymmetry of knowledge, that in many ways, you know better how to run a purchase process inside your customer's organization than they do themselves.

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Brent Adamson: And so I think one of the best ways to prevent ghosting is to decrease the likelihood that your customer gets stuck in one of those places in the first place.

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Brent Adamson: So what if, proactively, early on, we were saying, hey, you know, Jack, I love that you're excited. I'm excited that you're excited. I know that you see the value. It's really cool that we walked through this, but

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Brent Adamson: One thing, just a note of caution, because I've been down this road a couple times, and it can get kind of painful in ways that you may not have anticipated. When working with other customers like you who are in a very similar position, one of the things that they run into sometime in the next 3 weeks is this particular problem, and I'd hate to see that happen to you, because you're gonna get really frustrated.

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Brent Adamson: And what we've learned along the way is there's probably two things you couldâ€¦ two steps you could take now to avoid that. One isâ€¦ so weâ€¦ I learned this from a human capital management company selling to heads of HR.

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Brent Adamson: Where this one seller, we call her Tara in the book.

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Brent Adamson: She learned that she, you know, procurement always gets involved late, always blows things up, she learns again and again and again, lost enough deals from this, that she started advising chief heads of, or heads of HR, her clients.

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Brent Adamson: to actually invite procurement in early. See, one of the things you'd want to do is find out who on the procurement side is involved in this purchase, and we'd recommend, based on what we've learned from others, that you probably pull them in early and have this conversation together, and make sure you're aligned not on how great we are, but just aligned on what you're even trying to do in the first place, and why this matters so much.

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Brent Adamson: And you're going to getâ€¦ if you create that kind of relationship with your customer, you're far less likely to get ghosted, because they're far less likely to either think, you'reâ€¦ either I'm stuck and I don't want to tell you, or I'm stuck and you can't help me.

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Brent Adamson: You see, I think those are, you know, if I had to root cause, like, either I'm stuck, and I don't want to talk about it, I'm embarrassed, I'm overwhelmed, I'm just frustrated, so I'm notâ€¦ I don'tâ€¦ so there's noâ€¦ so I don't want to tell you that.

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Brent Adamson: Because you work so hard, or I'm stuck, and I just don't see how you can even help me anyway, so why bother talking to you? But I think those are two really important, or at least common reasons for ghosting, and both of those could be overcome

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Brent Adamson: Byâ€¦ by reducing the likelihood of them happening in the first place through frame making.

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Jack Hubbard: Your customer confidence checklist on page 17, I think, can really help here, being proactive to those issues that customers may face. And, you know, based on my experience, here's a couple of things you might face.

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Brent Adamson: You don't give them all 7 questions. No, don'tâ€¦

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Jack Hubbard: All of theâ€¦

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Brent Adamson: Yep.

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Jack Hubbard: Because now, it's like, holy crap, this is so overwhelming, I don't even want to talk to you at all. But you give them a couple to help educate them, and stay with them along the way, and it's a good thing. Here's something I'm sure you've thought of.

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Jack Hubbard: So I'm aâ€¦ I'm a 57-year-old sales

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Jack Hubbard: manager in banking. I'm a commercial sales manager.

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Brent Adamson: Yeah.

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Jack Hubbard: I've got 10 bankers. I've gone throughâ€¦

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Jack Hubbard: Challenger, and I've gone through Richardson, and etc, etc. I've gone through all these training programs, and I've been taught to be a sales manager. So I know this way, too.

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Jack Hubbard: And I'm trying to teach my salespeople this way. Now, all of a sudden.

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Jack Hubbard: comes this. How do I become a frame-making coach?

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Brent Adamson: Yeah. What?

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Brent Adamson: So, oh god, here comes Adamson, everyone duck, hide under the desk, right? He's gonna blow everything up again. So, so, whatâ€¦ so let's talk about coaching in a moment, and I think it's really important, but if I may, there's a shortâ€¦ I'll do this very briefly, but it's an important preamble.

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Brent Adamson: for what it's worth, Jack, and I think it's actually really important to say this, Iâ€¦ and sincerely, I have zero interest in bringing yet another sales methodology into the world. So, and we talk about this in the book, there's a whole chapter on this idea, butâ€¦

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Brent Adamson: I don't think of frame-making as aâ€¦ nor does Carl, so we don't think of frame-making so much as a methodology, but as a mindset. And there's a couple reasons why. Methodology, I think, first of all, that it's a vague word that sort of over-promises and under-delivers.

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Brent Adamson: There's goodness knows there's plenty of aspects of sales that we don't touch at all in this book. We don't get into negotiation techniques, for example, which, of course are critically important. Things like that. Soâ€¦ but we touch on lots of different parts. Weâ€¦ it's like, you can rethink discovery using framing, you can rethink, you know, stakeholder management through framing. So there'sâ€¦ butâ€¦

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Brent Adamson: That's enough of that. But the otherâ€¦ the other reason why we don't, think of it as a methodology is because people get really confused. To your point, it's like, hey, so, I thought I was supposed to be doing Challenger, and now you're telling me to do frame making, so which is it? And by the way, you'll notice, and thisâ€¦ I will dieâ€¦ I don't want to die on any hill, to be totally honest, but I will do battle on this hill, which is, you'll notice I will,

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Brent Adamson: I will, withâ€¦ with stubborn precision, say Frame Making and not Frame Maker. And the reason why is because I got my derriere handed to me once in a London meeting when I said Sensemaker, andâ€¦ to a bunch of companies that just rolled out Challenger, and they were mad. This is not an exaggeration, they were literally mad at me personally. It's like, youâ€¦ we just spentâ€¦

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Brent Adamson: hundreds of thousands of dollars on Challenger training, and now you're saying it's not Challenger, it's Sensemaker, and that's when I realized, no, no, it's still Challenger, but it'sâ€¦ what's Sensemaking, you know, and then theyâ€¦ and at that point, I'd already lost the room, and they were just angry, right? Butâ€¦

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Brent Adamson: But, you know, what's the difference between an er and an ing? One is an identity, and one's a behavior, and that really matters. So I don't need you to be anything, right? Or, I don't think you need to be, just be yourself, is what I think you should be, right? But in terms of what you're doing, engaging in, is this frame-making technique becomes a really powerfulâ€¦

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Brent Adamson: approach to apply to anything you're doing, so what I think of it as is a mindset. It's almost like a Simon Sinek why. Like, what's your why? It's like, so the mindset for frame making is, how do we help our customers make the best decision that they can in as little time as possible?

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Brent Adamson: And so goingâ€¦ and that's it. It's like, how do I help them just make a really great decision they feel good about? And if you think, well, what if they choose someone else? Well, then let's do that in as little time as possible. I'm gonna lose, I want to lose early, but I want to be the person they callâ€¦ the first person they call next time, because I'm the only one that showed up in a helpful manner.

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Brent Adamson: And so, if I'm coaching, I think that's what I gotta coach to, is what does it look like to coach to a mindset, and not just to a process?

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Brent Adamson: And coaching to a mindset really gets into these really interesting questions about, are you showing up in such a way that you are helping your customers feel more confident in themselves and understanding, sort of, that dynamic? And it also means

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Brent Adamson: it's gonna be a little harder to measure activity metrics, right? And justâ€¦ which, by the way, is never really good coaching anyway, that's sort of spreadsheet coaching, soâ€¦

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Brent Adamson: In some ways, actually, Jack, it's hard to tease your question apart between what is good coaching versus bad coaching versus what's frame-making coaching and other kinds of coaching, but I thinkâ€¦

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Brent Adamson: I think in some ways, the more urgent and important question is, what is good coaching versus bad coaching? Which is, it'sâ€¦ good coaching is behavior-based, it's not based on outcomes, but based on behaviors. It's delivered in a tailored sort of fashion, it is customized to the needs of a particular learner, it is tied to a learning path that allows them to get better at what they do.

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Brent Adamson: Over time, and it's delivered on an ongoing basis. These are things, by the way, for what it's worth, we talk about in all of the Challenger books, too, we get into this as well, and I think, in some ways, the DNA of great coaching

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Brent Adamson: isn't really any different here, it's just that the content of it might be a little different, as you think about, specifically, how do I coach you?

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Brent Adamson: In terms of helping customers feel more confident in themselves.

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Brent Adamson: I don't know.

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Jack Hubbard: I feel like.

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Brent Adamson: Adhesive, I didn't mean to evade your question, butâ€¦ No, you didn'.

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Jack Hubbard: Okay, alright. So, I'm theâ€¦ I'm the salesperson, and I come to my sales manager, and I say, you know what? This thing is stalled. I mean, this is going nowhere. I thought I had aâ€¦ I thought this was going to be a great opportunity, et cetera, et cetera.

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Jack Hubbard: A good frame-making manager might say things like, okay.

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Jack Hubbard: Haveâ€¦ when youâ€¦ let me ask you a few questions about the questions you've asked.

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Jack Hubbard: How are you educating the customer? How are you helping the customer through their buying process?

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Jack Hubbard: You know, there's a spaghetti bowl of this buying process. Now, it used to be linear, it's not anymore. What are you doing to help them through that? So, if I can just, as a good sales manager, just ask you the right questions, you might say.

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Jack Hubbard: You know what?

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Jack Hubbard: this hasn't been all about me. It's gotta be about them. Let me go back andâ€¦ etc, etc. That might just be enough for the experienced salesperson.

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Brent Adamson: I think so, and in the book, we try to, of course, make it a little bit more practical. So, in the book, the reason why customer confidence as an outcome matters so much is because, arguably, customer confidence has never been as under threat as it is today. And in the book, as you know, we unpack four different challenges that customers are facing that undermines their confidence. There's decision complexity.

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Brent Adamson: Information overload.

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Brent Adamson: objective misalignment across all those people, and then outcome uncertainty. And so, I think the first thing that a coach would want to do is try to help understand, through some questioning, and justâ€¦ and I think it'd be a collaborative discussion, rather than a, I know the answer and I'm trying to get you there.

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Brent Adamson: But I think it's a discovery process of, like, which of those four challenges seems to be the one that's really holding up this deal? Is it they just got stuck in their process? Are they overwhelmed with too much information and can'tâ€¦ and just, you know, paralysis analysis, or analysis paralysis? Is itâ€¦

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Brent Adamson: They love you, but they can't get alignment with their colleagues on not just how great we are, but on theâ€¦

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Brent Adamson: on the problem they're trying to solve. And then the outcome uncertainty would be oneâ€¦ the outcome uncertainty one is really interesting. That one shows up whenâ€¦

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Brent Adamson: Has this ever happened to you?

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Brent Adamson: Where you show up with all the ROI calculations, and the total cost of ownership, and the customer testimonials, maybe even the raving fans. You show, like, here's company X, how much they saved this last year, and here's company Y, and how much money they made as a result of our solution. You lay out this incredibly setâ€¦ this incredible set of compelling business cases of all these other companies that have made a huge amount of value gain as a result of working with you.

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Brent Adamson: and you think that that'sâ€¦ that should be sufficient. Your customer looks at you and says, I believe it, that's amazing. And they're saying all the right things. It's you're totally bought in, that they're bought in, and everyone's a love fest, like, oh, it's so amazing you had these results with those companies, butâ€¦

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Brent Adamson: You know, Jack, I gotta tell you, I'm a little worried, not because I don't believe your numbers, because I do, and that's what I want for us, too, but, you know, we're gonna find a way to screw this up, because we're just different. We just can't see it. Notice, you see what I'm saying? Like, I've had that conversation, too, right? And that is notâ€¦ I'm notâ€¦ and there's no matter ofâ€¦

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Brent Adamson: But look at this other company that's also happy with this. It doesn't solve for that, because again, that's a supplier-centric way of solving for this. I've got to come into their company, at least into their psyches, and help them understand what is it about their organization that makes them think that they can't do this, despite all this evidence, and then show them the social proof of other companies that may have been equally concerned, and found a way around that obstacle, and coached them in using that kind of information to help them feel like, oh, maybe we can do this, actually.

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Brent Adamson: Once I saw the storyâ€¦ so in other words, the evidence that you bring to bear is not the outcome, it's the behavior, so it'sâ€¦

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Brent Adamson: Oh, so interesting, we just circled back, notice. Do you see what just happened? You were asking about coaching, we were talking about how managers can coach their sellers, and we landed in the exact same language for sellers coaching their customers, which is it's about behaviors, it's not about outcomes. And it's just good coaching, it's good coaching.

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Jack Hubbard: Coaching is right. And you've provided some amazing coaching over your career. You know, I don't know if you consider this the best book, but it is truly awesome, and it'sâ€¦ Thank you.

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Jack Hubbard: Perfect for this kind of time, because buyers are really, really confused. You go to the store, do I want Bear or Excedrin? That's a short-term buying thing. And, you know, we just built our house. You know, a medium-term buying thing, and now I'm gonna buy a big computer system. This is tough.

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Jack Hubbard: This is.

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Brent Adamson: Yeah.

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Jack Hubbard: And you're trying to make it easier on the seller

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Jack Hubbard: On behalf of the buyer, which is.

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Brent Adamson: You know, what's crazy is we tell this story in the book, it was just from personal experience, but it even shows up in low-involvement stuff. You know, so there's a story ofâ€¦ did you ever go downâ€¦ you know why this story ends, but I'll do the short version, but the, you go into Amazon, and you go into Amazon thinking you're gonna buy something relatively simple. This is a true story, absolutely true story. The other day, I just got a new laptop.

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Brent Adamson: As you know, everything's switching over to USB-C now, so I need a new dongle for my laptop to attach an old, you know.

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Brent Adamson: peripheral of some kind. And so I go to, you know, go to Amazon, I put in the search string, dongle, because I just like to say the word, you know, USB-C, 8 inches long, whatever, you put in all, and it's like, Amazon comes back, you hit search, and Amazon says, no problem, here's 1500 options. Like, okay, that's a little overwhelming, I don't need 1,500, I just need one.

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Brent Adamson: I don't know where to start, but that's okay, because Amazon's like, no, understanding that's a problem, let's give you some guides. Here's Amazon's top pick, here's customer's choice, you know, so they give me a couple, they're like, great, I'll dig into this one, this is top pick, let me start with that one, looks good, you know, $7.50, no big deal, perfect size song, it comes in a pair, that's great, let me read a couple reviews, good, good, good.

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Brent Adamson: 4.8 stars. I think we're good to go. Let me just put this in my cart and buy it, and that should be done. Actually, you know, before I do, let me just read one or two of these one-star reviews, because that's a little weird, right? What's going on there? And you open up the one-star reviews, like, don't buy, you'd be an idiot if you bought this, arrive broken, you're a schmuck if youâ€¦ it's like, oh my god, she kind of panic, say, well, dodged a bullet there, let me look at the next one, right? Soâ€¦

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Brent Adamson: And, like, 3 hours later, you're still on Amazon shopping for a freaking dongle, and now youâ€¦ and you're getting really, really frustrated, right? And this has happened to me with gym socks, this happened to me with shorts, happened to me with a pair of shoes the other day. I'm what's called a maximizer, right? And soâ€¦ and at some point, you don't hate Amazon, you just hate yourself, right? And at some point, it's like, you know, it's justâ€¦

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Brent Adamson: I gotta buy a dongle, that's not worth it, right? Soâ€¦ and so, what's interesting to me is Amazonâ€¦ again, true story, as we all know, right? Amazon's got a button on their website, and if you press that button, the pain stops, and that button says, save for later. And if you press save for later, you don't get a dongle, but at least you get your life back.

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Brent Adamson: Right? And this absolutely true story is when I look at my wife's account, and I say this with somewhat tongue-in-cheek, it's absolutely true, but it's like, it's unfair to her, because she's not here to defend herself, but she has 582 items saved for later on her Amazon account.

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Brent Adamson: And that's 582 times someone wiped out on a purchase journey, just because at some point they just felt overwhelmed. And so, now you scale that up to a CRM system for your entire company across 4 continents and 60 people involved.

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Brent Adamson: where's my save for later button? I never want to do that again, right? And that'sâ€¦ that's where, to me.

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Brent Adamson: It's kind of amazing that commerce still happens at all, to be totally honest with you, and I think that's an absurd thing to say, because we all know, of course, you have to buy replenishables, factories have to run, people consume, so of course commerce is still going to run, but it does make me wonder, Jack, quite sincerely, how much more commerce could happen

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Brent Adamson: Customers just felt a little bit more confident in making a decision other than no decision at all.

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Brent Adamson: And that's what the book's about.

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Jack Hubbard: And that's a great way to wrap this up. You've got a tremendous website, and there are some amazing videos on it. Brent, talk about the website, how people can get the book, how people can get in touch with you.

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Brent Adamson: Thanks, Jack. So, A to B Insight hasâ€¦ so we have a company website, but where we're spending all our time and money and energy, and our focus is on the book website, which is, theframemakingsale.com.

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Brent Adamson: Or you can also go FrameMakingSale.com, either one takes the same place. We are uploading weekly videos, I'm doing what we call a Frame Making Foundational video series, which I also put on LinkedIn, so I'm very active on LinkedIn, feels like I sleep there these days, so you can find me there if you're trying to get ahold of me, it's the easiest thing to do.

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Brent Adamson: And then we've built a Frame Making Sale, the Frame Making Sale, YouTube channel as well, so all our content's there.

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Brent Adamson: You'll also find on the FramingSale.com, just an outline of all the workshops that we've built, so we've begun nowâ€¦ of course, I'm out on the rubber chicken keynote circuit, so I'm doing a lot of keynotes and sales kickoffs, and I love those. But we've now, built a series of four workshops to get after each of these four different challenges that customers are facing, and helping sellers learn how to,

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Brent Adamson: apply these techniques in very practical, very, very tactical ways to help themâ€¦ help customers feel more confident in themselves. And the one that's on the drawing board, you know, the oldâ€¦ it's on the roadmap, is frame making for marketers, and that's where we'll go next, is because there's so much work we can do around content design and deployment around frame making that's super powerful, soâ€¦

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Brent Adamson: If anyone finds any of that interesting, you know, you subscribe to the YouTube channel if you want, or just drop in every once in a while with a framing sale, or just find me on LinkedIn. I'm happy to answer any questions. It's, it's a really cool journey to be on.

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Jack Hubbard: Yeah, and it is a great journey. It's Christmas time.

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Brent Adamson: Yes, it is. This bookâ€¦

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Jack Hubbard: Could be under every single Christmas tree of every single salesperson, executive, and sales manager at your bank. It's called The Frame Making Sale by Brent Adamson. Brent, thanks so much for being with us today.

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Brent Adamson: Absolutely, Jack, you're welcome, and thank you. Appreciate you.

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Jack Hubbard: Iâ€¦ you know what? These interviews with you are so fabulous. You are my favorite all-time interview. You are the nicest man ever. I'm coming back again, flatter me more! So, do you thinkâ€¦ do you think you'll have a frame-making book for marketers, too?

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Brent Adamson: Weâ€¦ Carl and I debated, like, so weâ€¦ and eventually, we probably did the worst possible answer, which is we put some about the marketing in there, but not enough. Soâ€¦

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Brent Adamson: we've just barely touched the top of the, you know, the iceberg on Chapter 9 on marketing.

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Brent Adamson: I don't know if there's a whole notherâ€¦ now, this is the first book Carl wrote, and the day we turned in the manuscript, he looked at me over Zoom and said, Brent, I will never write a book again as long as I live. It'sâ€¦ it'sâ€¦ and he learned what I know, which is it's a slog. It's really hard, for me at least, and for him.

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Brent Adamson: So, I think I have one more book in me, Jack, but I think it's a different book. We'll talk about that sometime, other time, but the.

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Jack Hubbard: Yep.

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Brent Adamson: But the implicateâ€¦ very much like Challenger, Challenger really took off in about 2012-13, when marketers began to realize this is as much a story for marketers as it is for sellers. And I thinkâ€¦

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Brent Adamson: I think that's absolutely the case for frame making. What I don't have is a machine of 150 sales reps behind me out talking to CROs and CMOs all day long about the frame-making sales, so the biggest challenge I have right now with frame-making is just getting the word out.

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Brent Adamson: But I say this with as much humility as I can, and just because I've been doing this for so long, I have a really good, tuned gut instinct, and I believe

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Brent Adamson: frame-making is the challenger sale of our time, at least it has the potential to be. And now it's about execution. It's about my execution, getting the word out, because I think this book can completely rewrite the DNA of B2B sales, if we could just get enough people to kind of wrap their brains around it.

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Jack Hubbard: So do I. Yeah. So do I. And I'll do everything I can to help. Your program is on, December 3rd. Awesome. And so, you'll get all the marketing, blah blah, and all of theâ€¦ you'll get the full link if you want to put it on your website and do it. Great.

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Brent Adamson: You're the best, Jack. Thanks for letting me do this with you.

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Jack Hubbard: Thank you, Brad. This isâ€¦ it's a real privilege to talk to you, and again, your book is outstanding, really. Thank you.

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Brent Adamson: A lot of heart went into that, soâ€¦ and I love your office. I always would sit and stare at your office.

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Jack Hubbard: I'll let my wife know, she put it together.

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Brent Adamson: Nailed it. All right, Jack, talk later.

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Jack Hubbard: Bye.

Season 3, Episode 12: Brent Adamson

Brent Adamson Reveals the New Psychology of B2B Buying

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